Valve hired a renowned economist to study processes in the gaming economy

Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, who has recently been on the BBC, CNN and Bloomberg Television screens in connection with the Greek crisis, tells how fate brought him to Valve . Recently, Janis has become a well-known expert and receives hundreds of letters a day from desperate investors and businessmen. At first he received a message from Valve Director for spam, but then became interested. The head of the game studio invited him to study virtual economics. It turned out that this is a very exciting affair.

Thus, Valve became the second or thirda developer whose games will be analyzed by a full-time professional economist. The pioneer here is the company CCP and the game EVE Online - there Eyjólfur Guðmundsson has been publishing quarterly reports for five years now with an overview of the gaming economy, changes in price indices and other statistics.

Janis Varoufakis says that in his case it all started with one strange letter, which he fortunately did not manage to delete. This was a letter from Gabe Newell, Valve CEO.

Hello!

I am the president of a video game company (www.valvesoftware.com).

We are experiencing a number of problems in connection with the expansion of our virtual economies and their unification. Could you advise us?

For a while I read your blog ... Inside the company, we discussed the connection between the economies of the two virtual worlds (creating a single currency) and solved some difficult problems with the balance of payments, then I thought: “this is Germany and Greece,” this thought would not come to me if not for your blog. Instead of supporting the emulator of you inside my head, I decided, maybe we can interest the real you to see what we are doing.

Janus immediately became interested. He says that the virtual economy is an ideal simulator for conducting economic research, because every step is recorded here, any transaction leaves a digital footprint. Here you can conduct risky experiments that are impossible in real life, and even here you can try different scenarios. Most importantly, there is no need to focus on the so-called econometrics - checking economic theories with statistical data, which is extremely popular in modern economic science. Janus calls it "computerized astrology," and it can lead to conclusions like "the cause of the New Year is the growth in toy sales in December."

In a virtual economy, you have real access to all the data, so absolutely everything here is under the control of the researcher. The virtual economy is easier to learn, and it needs to be regulated just like a conventional economy.

Varoufakis decided to visit Valve's office after completing his lecture tour at American universities. He drove in, but was so impressed with Valve's office and atmosphere that he decided to stay here. Janus will now blog Valve Economics and explore the economics of Valve gaming universes.